Recently, I proposed a few points about the conjuncture in Britain.  None of these were offered in the spirit of hard and fast conclusions, but the aim was to begin to explain the stability and longevity of the coalition government in the face of quite serious social resistance despite its obvious weaknesses.  One factor that certainly needs to be added to this list is the delayed, protracted nature of the crisis facing the British working class.

It is often said that this government forgot the lesson that the Thatcherites learned: the need to salami slice one’s opponents, taking on weaker quarries first and only moving on to larger prey after a few demonstrative kills.  This government seems to be taking on everyone at once.  Its attacks on the public sector have at times seemed to be reckless, its negotiating stances absurdly hubristic, the sweep of its offensive indiscriminate.  Yet the two parties of government still have a plurality between them; they aren’t attacking everyone at once, they are attacking certain definite social constituencies, which are traditionally core Labour constituencies.  Of course, in the context of the wider capitalist offensive, this means that the vast majority of the working class, and a significant section of the middle class, suffers.  But they are doing so in a staged, multilayered fashion, and that has made a difference...

"You can't have room for innovation and the pressure for excellence without having some real discipline and some fear on the part of the providers that things may go wrong if they don't live up to the aims that society as a whole is demanding of them ... If you have diversity of provision and personal choice and power, some providers will be better and some worse. Inevitably, some will not, whether it's because they can't attract the patient or the pupil, for example, or because they can't get results and hence can't get paid. Some will not survive. It is an inevitable and intended consequence of what we are talking about." [Emphases added]

The public sector jobs massacre has begun with gusto, taking place twice as fast as was predicted. Rightwing mythology has it that the cuts are necessary because of Labour's reckless spending. The state has become bloated, choking the life out of the private sector. Cutting spending, privatising and currying favour with the City will spark off a new wave of dynamism from which all will profit. Negative growth in the last quarter? That's because of "the snow".

But the TUC's latest figures on the distribution of unemployment in the UK – which has now climbed to its highest level since 1994 – send a subtly different message. They show that joblessness in Labour constituencies is on average twice that in Tory constituencies. The extremes are telling. The Tory seat of Stratford-upon-Avon has only one jobseeker for every job. The core Labour constituency of Glasgow North West has 41.7 people chasing every job. The message, conveyed in the usual euphemisms about being "out of touch", is that the Tories are the party of the shires, warriors for their class who never have to see the misery they create. And the TUC is right. After all these years, and all these spin cycles, the Tories are still a party of wealth.

Making the Tories History
organised by the London Socialist Historians Group

Saturday 26th February 2011, 9.30am - 4.30pm
Institute of Historical Research
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1

The decision of the neo-liberal ‘Con-Dem’ coalition government to appoint the liberal historian Simon Schama over arch-Tory champion of Western imperial power Niall Ferguson, to advise them on re-designing the national curriculum for history in British schools suggests a space for debate about the nature of history and history teaching in the UK

Schama, now famous as a ‘TV historian’ was associated with History Workshop in the 1980s but subsequently discovered that he disliked the idea of revolution of any sort. More recently he has been associated with New Labour and the Obama administration in the US.

However it is Education Secretary Michael Gove that looks to be calling the shots. The Tories seem to want a return to the kind of ‘traditional history’ taught in schools decades ago, designed primarily to inspire loyalty to the British Empire. This kind of ‘history’ was effectively satirised in W.C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s anti-imperialist classic, 1066 and All That, which began by stressing that the only ‘memorable history’ was the “self-sacrificing determination…of the…Great British People…to become Top Nation” and concluded by noting that now “America was thus clearly Top Nation and history came to a .”

Yet the weakness of this new Conservative-led government is epitomised by the fact that the Tories also have a quite ‘memorable history’ of their own as the political party of choice of not only many notorious reactionaries but of the British ruling class as a whole–while there is also a‘memorable history’ of working class resistance to them. The Tories have subsequently long been detested and distrusted by the organised British working class movement but also wider swathes of society.

At the same time there are other sides to Toryism. George Orwell said that when you meet a clever Conservative it is time to count your change and check your wallet. The Tory Party has not survived for two hundred years simply by being vicious; it has shown a remarkable capacity for adaptation. Disraeli is the archetypal Tory thinker, but the Conference will also look at ‘left Tories’ like Harold Macmillan in the 1930s and the way the Tory Party adapted to the post-World War II world (as studied in Nigel Harris’s Competition and the Corporate Society: British Conservatives, the State and Industry, 1945-1964, Methuen, London, 1971 and 1973.). Finally the question of ‘compassionate conservatism’/ Red Toryism will be reviewed. Is it hypocritical froth or does it have a more serious ideological role?

This conference, ‘Making the Tories History’, organised by the London Socialist Historians Group aims to discuss some of the parts of the Tories’ own history as a political party that they would prefer people either forgot or knew nothing at all about. Developing ‘a socialist history of the Tories’ can help act as a weapon in the wider struggle against the Con-Dem cuts and their relentless attacks on working class people, as well as rally the resistance of those concerned in defending history from pro-imperialist propagandists like Michael Gove.

"[T]he supply of indentured servants to the Chesapeake had dried up in the years immediately following the disturbance of the 1670s [Bacon's Rebellion]. Even if Virginia farmers and planters had wanted to continue purchasing white servants at that time, the number of indentured migrants was insufficient to meet their needs. The most convincing explanation of the transition from servitude to slavery in the Chesapeake lies in the changing supply and demand situation for servants at this time and the increased availability of African slaves, obtainable in conditions of nearly perfect elasticity of supply ... During the transition from servitude to slavery in the Chesapeake, comparative prices for both forms of labour played their part in determining planters' decisions to purchase unfree workers ... purchasers acted in an economically rational manner."

Ultimately, the only check upon oppression is the strength and effectiveness of resistance to it.

Resistance does not refer only to the fight that individuals, or collections of them, put up at any given time against those trying to impose on them. It refers also to the historical outcome of the struggle that has gone before, perhaps long enough before to have been hallowed by custom or formalized in law—as ‘the rights of an Englishman’, for example. The freedoms of lower-class Englishmen, and the somewhat lesser freedoms of lower-class Englishwomen, were not gifts of the English nobility, tendered out of solicitude for people of their own colour or nationality. Rather, they emerged from centuries of day-today contest, overt and covert, armed and unarmed, peaceable and forcible, over where the limits lay. Moral scruples about what could and what could not be done to the lower classes were nothing but the shoulds and should nots distilled from this collective historical experience, ritualized as rules of behaviour or systematized as common law—but always liable to be put once again on the table for negotiation or into the ring for combat.19 Each new increment of freedom that the lower classes regarded as their due represented the provisional outcome of the last round in a continuing boxing-match and established the fighting weights of the contenders in the next round.

Custom and Law
In the round that took place in early colonial Virginia, servants lost many of the concessions to their dignity, well-being and comfort that their counterparts had won in England. But not all. To have degraded the servants into slaves en masse would have driven the continuing struggle up several notches, a dangerous undertaking considering that servants were well-armed, that they outnumbered their masters, and that the Indians could easily take advantage of the inevitably resulting warfare among the enemy. Moreover, the enslavement of already arrived immigrants, once news of it reached England, would have threatened the sources of future immigration. Even the greediest and most short-sighted profiteer could foresee disaster in any such policy. Given how fast people died in Virginia, the lifetime’s labour of most slaves would probably have amounted to less than a seven-year term of servitude (fifteen thousand immigrants between 1625 and 1640 only increased the population from some thirteen hundred to seven or eight thousand).20 And the prospect of gaining enslaveable children in the future—an uncertain prospect, considering how few women arrived during the boom years21—could not compensate for the certain loss of adult immigrants in the present.

Some of these same considerations argued against employing African descended slaves for life on a large scale; others did not. Needless to say, adverse publicity did not threaten the sources of forced migration as it did those of voluntary migration. Much more important: Africans and Afro-West Indians had not taken part in the long history of negotiation and contest in which the English lower classes had worked out the relationship between themselves and their superiors. Therefore, the custom and law that embodied that history did not apply to them. To put it another way: when English servants entered the ring in Virginia, they did not enter alone. Instead, they entered in company with the generations who had preceded them in the struggle; and the outcome of those earlier struggles established the terms and conditions of the latest one. But Africans and Afro-West Indians did enter the ring alone. Their forebears had struggled in a different arena, which had no bearing on this one. Whatever concessions they might obtain had to be won from scratch, in unequal combat, an ocean away from the people they might have called on for reinforcements. Africans and Afro-West Indians were thus available for perpetual slavery in a way that English servants were not.